Jimmy Dore on the Real Reason for the Civil War and Western Military Attacks on Syria

This is an extremely important piece from Jimmy Dore, the American comedian, who sometimes appears as a guest on the left-wing internet news show, The Young Turks. Dore is a consistent critic of American imperialism and its long history of overthrowing and destabilising the governments of poor nations around the globe, when they don’t bow down and surrender to American and Western political and corporate interests.

In this video, he comments on a piece published by John F. Kennedy jnr in EcoWatch and Politics magazines. This article provides damning, point for point proof that the reason for the civil war and calls in the West for military intervention in Syria has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. John Kerry, one of the main movers in this, isn’t interested or concerned by how many children have been killed or hospitals bombed by Assad. The real reason is what you might expect it to be, given the similar circumstances that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

It’s all about the petrochemical industry. And in this case, it’s a natural gas pipeline, proposed in 2000 by Qatar. This would cost $10 billion and run for 1,500 km from Qatar, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Another gas pipeline has also been proposed, which would run from Iran, through Iraq to Syria. These are both opposed by Russia. But they are most opposed to the Qatar to Turkey pipeline. Russia sells 70 per cent of its oil exports to Europe. Putin therefore regards this pipeline as an ‘existential threat’, a NATO plot to change the existing political and economic situation, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and deny it leverage in the European energy market.

Syria also opposes the pipeline. In 2009 Assad refused to sign the agreement allowing the pipeline to pass through his country in order to protect the interests of the Russians, who are his allies. The moment he made this decision, military and intelligence planners formulated a plan to start a Sunni uprising in Syria.

Fore quotes another commenter, Cy Hersh, who states that before the war, Assad was actually beginning to liberalise the country. He gave thousands of files on jihadi radicals to the CIA after 9/11, as he viewed the jihadis as his and America’s mutual enemies.

On September 13th, 2013, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, told congress that the Sunni kingdoms in the Middle East – that is, countries like Qata and Saudi Arabia – had offered to pay for an American invasion of Syria to overthrow Assad. He repeated this statement to Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican congresswoman for Florida.

Two years before this, the US had joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the ‘Friends of Syria Coalition’, which demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA also paid $6 million to Barada, a TV company in Britain, to run pieces demanding Assad’s overthrow. Files from Saudi Intelligence released by WikiLeaks also show that by 2012 Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were training, arming and funding Sunni jihadists from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

Dore makes the point that the decision to use a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’as isn’t a new policy. In 2008 a report by the Rand Corporation, funded by the Pentagon, provided the blueprint for the strategy. This stated that the control of the petrochemical resources in the Persian Gulf was a strategic priority for America, and that this would ‘intersect strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.’

He also points out that this is the same policy America has adopted against nations the world over when they have refused to serve American interests. It’s particularly similar to the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq, in the 1950s. Iran at that time was a secular democracy, just as Syria is a secular state. However, America was afraid of Arab nationalism, linking it with Communism. Mossadeq nationalised the Iran oil industry, which was previously in the hands of the West. So the CIA arranged a coup, which led to the Shah eventually ruling as the country’s absolute monarch. Until he was toppled in 1979 by the Islamic Revolution, which produced the Ayatollah Khomeini and the current Iranian regime that has been a bitter opponent of America ever since.

Dore also states that it was known long before this that American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere was turning the world’s peoples against America. He cites a report by Bruce Lovett in the 1950s which condemned American military interventions around the world as ‘antithetical to American leadership’ and moral authority, and noting that this occurred without Americans knowledge. In other words, as Dore points out, they don’t hate the US because America enjoys freedoms that they don’t possess. They hate America because America bombs and kills them. The people in those countries are well aware of what is occurring, but this is carefully kept from America’s own people.

This is all too plausible. Dore’s own producers off-camera state that they’re not conspiracy theorists, but there’s nothing in this that is implausible given America’s foreign policy record.

This is the real reason we have people in our own parliament, like Bomber Benn, demanding military action against Assad in Syria. It also shows, on a more philosophical level, how right Jacob Bronowski, the scientist and member of the Fabian Society, when he decried war as ‘theft by other means’.

None of this makes Putin any less of a thug and a bully domestically. And Assad is also guilty of horrific human rights abuses. But those are not the reasons we’re being led into another war in the Middle East, and possibly with Russia.

I can remember back in 1990 when Gulf War 1 broke out. There were protesters chanting, ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco’. The Green Party denounced it as a ‘resource war’. They were right then, and I’ve no doubt whatsoever they’re right now.

Our courageous young men and women should not be sent to die just to despoil another nation of its natural resources, and inflate the already bloated wealth of more petrochemical industry executives and oil sheikhs. And we definitely shouldn’t be doing anything to assist the Saudis, the very people who are giving lavish material aid to al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to export a viciously intolerant and brutal Islamism around the world through military force.

And a little while ago I mentioned how the veteran British comics writer, Pat Mills, had put in a few satirical comments about the Gulf War in the ABC Warriors strip in 2000 AD. In the stories about the Volgan War, the robot soldiers recount how they fought in a war against the Russians, the real cause of which was to steal the Russians’ oil reserves after the world had past the tipping point. This was called by the Volgans/Russians the ‘Fourth Oil War’.

Russia has indeed vast resources of oil and other minerals, which it exports around the world. And again, NATO forces are building up in eastern Europe, with NATO generals predicting that by May next year, we will be at war with Russia. It seems to me that Mills is right, probably more than he knew when he wrote the strip, and that the West really is pushing for a war to seize their oil.

This may lead us all into nuclear Armageddon. Quite apart from being grossly immoral.

Absolutely, which raises questions about Jeremy Clarkson’s role in international conflict. You can’t blame him for this one, but one of Lobster’s regulars wondered if part of the reason Jezzer has become such a celebrity is because motoring correspondents always take the side of the company when reporting an industrial dispute.

I agree with you on the importance of this piece, I put this out on Google plus Friday and received an interesting comment from another googlepuser David Croswell on Dore’s comments he said:

“Mostly right.
The gas field involved is the `South Pars’, the largest in the world.
There are only two countries that have access to this, and they are Qatar and Iran.

Syria is Iran’s number one ally in the Middle East, which is why you see an Iranian military supportive presence in Syria.
So, Assad’s veto on the Qatari pipeline wasn’t simply `for our friend, Russia’.

However, Iran and Russia have a cosy relationship, also, and are working in coordination, with Iran handling the Islamic public relations aspect in the central Asian nations, and, with their gas programme, now extending pipelines to Pakistan and India in the opposite direction to Europe, developing their market there.

So, this shows another factor to the U.S. aspect: In their ongoing campaign to isolate Iran to place it in a more vulnerable position, it is necessary to kick out the prop of their number one Middle Eastern ally, Syria.

In their intent to regain what they once had for next to nothing in Iran, the fourth largest oil production on the planet (Iran was where BP got started, which is why we always find the UK riding along), they’ll also have possession of the South Pars gas field.

Of course, isolating Russia financially and geopolitically, along the way, is a major goal.

So, all and all, the west are not the forces of goodness and niceness … at all.”

Thanks, Michelle, for putting this on Google, and for the extra info. I wasn’t aware of the connection to Iran, Pakistan and India, but this makes very much. Syria is indeed an ally of Iran, and Iran was allied with Russia. So as you and David Croswell point out, this is all about America and Britain trying to isolate Iran and Russia. No, the West is definitely the force for good and niceness. We’re back once again to what Napoleon called us: perfidious Albion.

Hi again Beastie, the conversation/comments have continued from David Crosswell on my post, he also said:

“The Syrian fields in the Golan Heights are already being exploited by Israel, with Murdoch and Cheney being two major beneficiaries roped in, in order to horse-shoe support from the U.S./UK support base.

Also, the gas fields off the Gaza are being siphoned off, with American help.

This is what it’s all about.
Wars are not fought on principle any more, but for corporate profit, so the contention that the U.S. is an oligarchy is not at all far-fetched….”

I replied: “Wars have always been fought for power and profit, empires and their trading companies have been carving up peoples and their nations for centuries, hence their armed forces were just as much corporate employees then as they are now.

In the UK there is also a military recruitment crisis so the UK government is using non-subtle techniques to recruit amongst children still at school:

Thanks again, Michelle for this extra information. It’s depressing, but very useful. It also makes me appreciate all the more the views of one of the art teachers at my old school. The army used to come in trying to recruit, and she was very much opposed to it. I think her father had been an air raid warden during the Second World War, and she had picked up from him some of the terrible sights of carnage he’d seen, which had made her very anti-militarist.